(09-30-2023, 10:11 AM)mikesez Wrote:

(09-30-2023, 08:51 AM)homebiscuit Wrote: You're running in circles. I explained he's still in prison because Biden took the shiny bait for political reasons rather than negotiate moderately hard for Whelan. Or did you mean why he was in prison in the first place? Does it matter? We're dealing with the Russians here. You can be assured they are lying, or exaggerating, about the charges. Regardless, he's a U.S. citizen.

We had Viktor Bout, who could have been traded for both Griner and Whelan. But instead of playing hardball, the Biden handlers took Griner only because she was the grand shiny prize in a U.S. landscape that was in the middle of a social and gender identity maelstrom, and Putin knew it. That's exactly why they arrested her. She ticked off all the boxes of leftist social and political passions. 

Try to wrap your head around the fact that a U.S. citizen is still languishing in a Russian prison because his government left him there in order to achieve a political victory for a particular constituency, because that is exactly what happened.

Your reasoning is circular, not mine.  The men imprisoning Whelan answer to Putin, not Biden.  You admit that Putin exagerrates and lies.  Yet you are sure that Biden had a clear path to getting Whelan freed.  Where does your confidence come from?  Should Griner still be in Russian prison?

You're parsing the argument in order to find wiggle room. But that's neither here nor there. The premise of the entire argument is we had someone the Russians wanted badly, and we gave him up for a cheap political consolation prize. 

Should Griner still be in prison? If we had earnestly negotiated with the Russians, the answer is yes if they weren't willing to give us Whelan and Griner. Whelan should have been first in queue to be repatriated and we had the negotiating piece to do it. Now we don't and probably never will again until Whelan serves out his sentence. 

I don't know why you are so hell bent on defending Biden's obvious faux pas. It's really puzzling.

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